EAST COAST OF GREENLAND JULY 4^{ TH} 1892 R. E. PEARY, U.S. NAVY
OBSERVATION SPOT ON NAVY CLIFF LAT. 81° 37′ 5″ N. LONG. 34° 5′ W. ]
The night of the 5th to the 6th of August was an exquisitely clear and perfect one. From eight to eleven Astrup and myself and our remaining five dogs toiled up the north slope of the largest of the ice-domes between the head of McCormick Bay and the edge of the true interior ice—one to which I had given the name “Dome Mountain.” As I rose over the crest of the great white mass and looked down and forward upon our course, there, some two miles away, upon the slope of the next dome, were two or three dark, irregular objects. Even as I looked at them they moved and separated, until I could count several detached bodies. They could be but one thing—men; and as there were so many of them, and as I was sure that none of the Eskimos could have been persuaded by my boys to set foot upon the inland ice, I knew in an instant that some ship was lying in the bay waiting for us. It was but a little while later, both parties descending rapidly toward each other, that we met in the depression between the two domes, and I grasped again the hand of Professor Heilprin, who had been the last to say good-by to me a year before, as I lay a cripple in my tent, and who now had come again to meet me and bring us back. It was a strange and never-to-be-forgotten meeting. In the ship lying at anchor at the very head of the bay I found the woman who had been waiting for me for three months, and two days later we were back again in the little house which had sheltered us through a year of Arctic vicissitudes.
Such, in brief, is the outline of the inland-ice journey from McCormick Bay to the northern shore of Greenland and back. Its important results are already well known, and it is not necessary to revert to them here. I will attempt, however, to give some adequate impression of the unique surroundings in which our work was done, and also to make clear the real character of this great interior ice-plateau, a natural feature so entirely different from any with which we are acquainted in better known portions of the globe that I have sometimes found it difficult to convey, even to the most cultivated minds, a really adequate conception of what the great ice-cap is like.